Amazing Grace: the story of the slave trader who wrote the world’s most famous hymn

John Newton was the worst of the worst: a slave ship captain, a blasphemer feared even by his own crew, a man who had hit rock bottom at sea and in his soul. Nobody would have imagined that this same man would write “Amazing Grace,” probably the most sung and recorded hymn in history, sung today in churches, funerals, concerts, and films. But few know that behind its simple melody there is a man who one day discovered that for him, too, there was forgiveness. This is the story of John Newton: the man who went from selling human beings to singing the grace of God.

The boy who got lost at sea

John Newton was born in London on July 24, 1725. He lost his mother while still a child and was left in the care of a severe father, a ship captain, who very soon introduced him to the hard life of the sea. The boy forged a rebellious character, hardened by the roughness of the sea.

At 18 he was forcibly recruited to serve in the Royal Navy. He tried to desert and was punished with lashes before the whole crew. Embittered and full of resentment, he ended up enlisting on a slave ship. He did not fit in even there: the crew despised him, and on one voyage they abandoned him on the coast of Africa, where he ended up living like just another slave, dressed in rags and begging for food.

When he was finally rescued by a ship whose captain knew his father, Newton had learned nothing. He had become one of the most blasphemous sailors in the Atlantic: mocking and cruel, capable of inventing insults against God that not even his companions had ever heard. He seemed destined to die as he lived: hardened, hopeless, and far from God.

The night the ocean roared

On March 21, 1748, the ship Greyhound was sailing the North Atlantic back to England when a violent storm struck it mercilessly. The waves tore the sails and the ship creaked as if it were going to split in two. In the midst of the chaos, a sailor standing just where Newton had been moments before was swept away by a wave and disappeared in the darkness. Newton understood the message: it could have been him.

Desperate, he asked the captain to let him try something with the bilge pumps. The officer agreed, and Newton, in his own words, exclaimed: “If this will not do, then Lord have mercy upon us!” He tied himself to the pump together with another sailor so the water would not carry them away, and worked for hours without rest. Exhausted, he took the helm until midnight, with plenty of time to think about his life.

Two weeks later, the battered Greyhound and its hungry crew landed at Lough Swilly, in Ireland. Newton had survived, but something more important had begun: for the first time in years, that professional blasphemer had begun to pray. He found a Bible on board and opened it in the Gospel of Luke, where he read that God gives his Spirit to those who ask him. He spent the rest of the voyage reflecting and praying. The storm had passed, but inside him another was just beginning: that of an awakening conscience.

A conversion that took years

Here is something that should be said honestly, because Newton himself admitted it: his change was not instant. That cry in the storm did not turn him into a saint overnight. In fact, he continued captaining slave ships between 1750 and 1754, although inside he was no longer the same man: he read the Bible, prayed, and wrestled with his conscience.

It was a stroke in 1754 that put an end to his life at sea. Away from the ships, he prepared for the ministry. In 1764 he was ordained a priest of the Anglican Church and assigned to the small parish of Olney, a village in the county of Buckinghamshire, in England. The former slave trader now preached the gospel from a pulpit.

At Olney he met the poet William Cowper, and between the two of them a beautiful custom was born: Newton wrote hymns to illustrate his Sunday sermons, so the congregation would better understand the message. His hymns had something that set them apart: they spoke in the first person, something uncommon at the time. Newton did not sing theories; he sang his life.

The sermon that became a hymn

At the end of December 1772, Newton was preparing the sermon for the New Year service, January 1, 1773. His text was the first book of Chronicles, chapter 17, verses 16 and 17, where King David, amazed at God’s favor, asks: “Who am I, O Lord God, that you have brought me this far?”

As he meditated on those words, Newton looked back on his own life: the storms, the slavery, the blasphemy, the slave ship… Who was he, that God should have brought him that far, to a pulpit? From that reflection six stanzas were born, which he titled “Faith’s Review and Expectation.” The first stanza said:

“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”

The hymn was published in 1779 in “Olney Hymns,” the hymnal that Newton and Cowper compiled with their compositions. In that book, the song was one among hundreds. Nobody imagined that two and a half centuries later it would be the most famous of all.

The American melody and the verse he did not write

A curious detail: the melody we all associate today with “Amazing Grace” is not the original. In Newton’s time, hymnals did not carry music: they were small books of religious poetry, and each congregation sang the verses to different melodies. Newton’s lyrics circulated for decades with various tunes, until in 1835 an American composer named William Walker joined them to a folk melody known as “New Britain” in his songbook “The Southern Harmony.” It was a perfect marriage: the music had an air of wonder that seemed made for those words.

Another fact few know: the last stanza everyone sings today, the one that says “when we’ve been there ten thousand years…,” was not written by Newton. Those verses appeared in 1852 in the famous novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and with time they became incorporated into the hymn.

From the slave ship to abolition

Newton’s story did not end with the hymn. Over the years, that man who had taken part in the slave trade became one of its most determined enemies. In 1788 he published a writing titled “Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,” where he openly confessed his guilt and described in detail the horrors he had witnessed. “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders,” he wrote.

Newton joined the parliamentarian William Wilberforce and offered him his testimony as a direct witness of the trade. In February 1807, just a few months before Newton’s death, the British Parliament approved the law prohibiting the slave trade throughout the empire. The former slave trader lived to see the beginning of the end of that in which he had once taken part.

Before dying, on December 21, 1807, Newton wrote his own epitaph, which sums up his life better than any biography: “John Newton, clergyman, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the gospel he had so long laboured to destroy.”

Grace that still sings

The hymn turned 250 years old on January 1, 2023, and it is more alive than ever: the United States Library of Congress records more than three thousand recordings of the song, performed by artists of every style, from Judy Collins to Elvis Presley. It is sung at weddings and funerals, in stadiums and in small chapels, and it held a special place in the struggle for civil rights in the United States.

Perhaps the secret of “Amazing Grace” is the same as that of its author: it does not speak of perfect people, but of the lost who were found, of the blind who now see. Every time we sing it, we join that young man terrified in the storm of 1748, who discovered that God’s grace reaches even the worst of sinners. Because that is, in the end, the story of all of us: we were blind, but now we see. Today you can find it among the great Christian hymns of all time, alongside the songs that have marked the history of faith. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!